‘He was crazy’: Extreme tests that show why hail is a multi-billion-dollar problem

It left scars Sometimes houses sound like gunshot explosions. In the aftermath of major storms, Andrew Schick, owner and CEO of Illinois-based Roofing USA, was driving through hail-battered suburbs and was stunned by the damage.

Earlier this year, he visited a farm complex in western Illinois where roofs, even sturdy metal ones, were left gouged and gouged after 3-inch balls of ice fell from the sky. “It was crazy,” he recalls. There were even baseball-sized holes in the grass. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Shick has been in the roofing business for several years now. He says it feels like the blizzards are getting worse. The damage caused by hail is certain Increasingly expensive To fix, thanks to inflation. Insurance companies are and modify its policies To demand higher deductions from those affected by hail damage. “A lot of the customers I met had no idea their policies had changed until the hail hit their roofs,” Schick says.

There’s no denying that hail has become very expensive. In 2024, hail damage in the United States will cost more than damage from hurricanes and floods combined. That year, the expenses were cold-related Estimates indicate that it has reached tens of billions of dollarsProbably about $40 billion. Just 15 years ago, the annual cost of hail damage was less than $1 billion, says Tanya Brown Giamanco, director of disaster and failure studies at NIST, a non-regulatory agency that sets standards and standards for a wide range of products. On top of the inflation problem, there are more people Move to cold-prone areas of the United States.

Forms of cold When updrafts of air in thunderstorms carry raindrops upward into the cooler parts of the storm, where they freeze. The pellets then grow as they come into contact with more moisture that freezes on their surface. When they become too heavy for the air to carry, they fall as hailstones.

While the data indicates this Severe hail storms are becoming more frequent In the United States in recent years, no one is quite sure if or how climate change will affect hail in the future. There is still a surprising amount we do not know about hailstones and how they fall in the air. Companies are increasingly marketing hail-resistant roofing products because homeowners are under increasing pressure to strengthen their properties against this atmospheric bombardment. But when hailstones the size of your fist rain down on your roof, is there anything you can do to save it?

Most people would feel hopeless if a giant hail hit their homes. Not Becky Adams Celine. Last summer, 3-inch-wide bricks crashed into her Nebraska home, damaging the roof. Once the storm was over, Adams Sellen, principal scientist at the Atmospheric and Environmental Research Corporation, rushed outside to collect samples. She still had some stones she collected in the refrigerator. “I thought, ‘I have more data!’” she says.